[R] R on Linux/Opteron?

[Liaw, Andy]

Thanks to all (and especially Prof. Tierney) for the response.  The box we
are considering will spend probably over 90% of CPU time in R, so it's
comforting to know that R compiles and pass all the test (at least once) on
such platform.

(I switched my attention from Itanium to Opteron when I read that Itanium is
slower than P4 for number crunching...)

Best,
Andy

> From: Luke Tierney [mailto:luke at stat.uiowa.edu] 
> 
> On 26 Aug 2003, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:
> 
> > Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> writes:
> > 
> > > On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 03:17:19PM -0400, Liaw, Andy wrote:
> > > > Has anyone tried using R on the the AMD Opteron in 
> either 64- or 
> > > > 32-bit mode?  If so, any good/bad experiences, 
> comments, etc?  We 
> > > > are considering getting this hardware, and would like 
> to know if R 
> > > > can run smoothly on such a beast.  Any comment much appreciated.
> > > 
> > > http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?&pkg=r-base&arch=ia64&file=log
> > > 
> > > has logs of R builds on ia64 since Nov 2001, incl. the outcome of 
> > > make check. We do not run the torture tests -- though I guess we 
> > > could on some of the beefier hardware such as ia64.
> > 
> > I don't think that's quite the same beast, though. Opterons are the 
> > "x86-64" (or amd64) architecture and ia64 is Intel's, aka Itanium. 
> > Debian appears to be just warming up to including this 
> architecture: 
> > 
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-x86-> 64/2003/debian-x86-64-200308/thread
> > s.html
> > whereas they have had ia64 out for a while.
> > 
> > SuSE has an Opteron option and Luke said he tried it. Apparently it 
> > has a functioning 64-bit compiler toolchain - I weren't 
> sure earlier 
> > whether they were just running a 64bit kernel and 32bit 
> applications, 
> > but when Luke says so, I believe it...
> > 
> 
> I wasn't sure either, especially about default settings, but 
> 'file' says
> 
> luke/R> file bin/R.bin 
> bin/R.bin: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, AMD x86-64, version 1 
> (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
> 
> and in R
> 
> > Sys.info()["machine"]
>  machine 
> "x86_64" 
> > .Machine$sizeof.pointer
> [1] 8
> 
> So it looks like a functional 64-bit setup so far.
> 
> luke
> 
> -- 
> Luke Tierney
> University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
> Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
>    Actuarial Science
> 241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:      luke at stat.uiowa.edu
> Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
> 
> 

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